benbreen

Seems that landing experimental aircraft on the Capitol steps was a thing. Senator Hiram Bingham landed both a blimp (1929) and this "autogyro" (1931) there too: https://uschs.fil…

Right, but the reason that labor is done on a volunteer basis has something to do with the inherent prestige of the legacy journals. In my field, anyone would gladly referee an article or review a boo…

The big problem is how to fund something that looks, for instance, like #2 here. Academic journals have a certain functionality (create a legitimizing forum for research that gets people jobs, tenure,…

I love Lapham's Quarterly. Also, what a missed opportunity it represents for Harper's (Lapham's previous employer). Harper's has been famously slow to embrace the web and as a resu…

I think that's right. Part of why the Fayum mummies are so startling (to me at least) is that they aren't as damaged as other ancient art. Many Greek bronzes originally featured inlaid mothe…

I think there's definitely something uncanny about being able to look a dead person in the eyes. It's not so much the recognition that everyone will die as the ability to simultaneously see …

This is a great resource - I'd been seeing a handful of photos from the site but it's striking to see them collected like this. The mosaic floor of Hermes is especially beautiful.

Exactly - and the declining demand explanation doesn't even necessarily imply a general societal-level lack of demand. Simply that the academic system is now weighted to favor increasing funding …

Agreed, Diamond's most salient points are 1) the latitudinal axis of Eurasia compared to the longitudinal one of the Americas and 2) the role of domesticated animals as disease vectors. The stuff…

Mann talks about this in the book version of 1491, as does the historian David Noble Cook in Born to Die: Disease and New World Conquest . Neither are trying to claim (at all) that the enormous popul…

Mann's books ("1491" and "1493") are even better - great examples of longform journalism as history. They also update some of the facts in the article, since we've learne…

Anthony Grafton (polymathic historian of the book at Princeton) actually built a replica of the book wheel pictured in the original post. Only one of its kind in the world, as far as I know: http:&#x…

In my humanities field (history) I've heard that hardcover books from university presses yield virtually nothing in royalties (on the order of a couple hundred dollars) but that if a book is repr…